For Tony Blair: The Real Extremism

Someone that believes that Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim had the right to steal Palestine from the native population on the basis of an etymological relationship between the word "Jew" and the word "Judea" would by the same reasoning argue that the Irish have the right to ethnically cleanse and steal Rome because the Irish mostly practice the Roman Catholic religion, which contains the word "Roman" in its name. Zionist ideology is so extreme that it is practically psychotic, and any Zionist or supporter of Zionism should be denaturalized and treated as a dangerous psychopath. Sphere: Related Content

Some Thoughts on "Islamic Terror" for Professional anti-Islamists like Pipes

ABOUT THE STRUGGLE FOR ISLAM'S SOUL

Like ZIAUDDIN SARDAR in The New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com/200507180004), the western-educated Lebanese that run The Daily Star also shout the standard battle-cries of anti-Islamic demonization (see http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=17&article_id=16760), Islamic fundamentalist terror has little connection to Muslim faith. This terrorist program results from a volatile combination of generic religious nativism, communalist primordialism and reaction to Western modernity. A similar collection of phenomena appeared at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In those days the radical ideological brew also included economic revolutionism, ethnic fundamentalism and organic nationalism.

Today's popular misnomer of Islamic terror is not as unprecendented as Karen Armstrong argues. Ninety years ago the bogeyman of Judeobolshevik terrorism was a major component of political, popular and academic discourse. Honest historians will admit that there was a lot more truth in this historical anti-Semitic slur than there is in modern anti-Muslim terminology even if the vast majority of ethnic Ashkenazim of that time period were neither Bolsheviks nor Communists.

Yet Bolshevism was not the only murderous and radical ideology to take root among ethnic Ashkenazim back then. Stanislawski's Zionism and the Fin de Siecle points out that Herzl, Nordau and Jabotinski, who were the three main founders and creators of Zionist ideology, were strongly attracted to the anti-Semitic mindset. They planted the seeds of an ethnic Ashkenazi variant of such violent, racist and irrational thinking in Zionist ideology. The crop that has germinated from their seminal ideas has reached full bloom in the ongoing anti-Islamic demonization that racist Zionist colonizers and racist ethnic Ashkenazim are incessantly distributing throughout Western and world media.

As a consequence, racist ethnic Ashkenazim and Zionist colonizers provide yet another example of the common historical pattern where the descendants of a victimized population become themselves a population of victimizers. The material that the professional anti-Islamists produce today even almost exactly reproduces the titles of works that professional Judeophobes produced in the past. Probably with no awareness of his far more learned but similarly malicious forerunner, Robert Spencer called his recently published collection of anti-Islamic bigotry Islam Unveiled, a title that has a striking resemblance to Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Revealed), the name Eisenmenger chose for his epic screed against Judaism and Jewry. Just as Serbs, who viewed themselves as victims of genocide during WW2, fell so easily into a murderous victimization mode during the 1990s, likewise today racist ethnic Ashkenazim and racist Zionist colonizers, who are descended from the victims of incitement that lead to genocide, are now major purveyors or encouragers(*) of very similar incitement against Arabs and Muslims.

Joachim Martillo

(*) Spencer is not ethnic Ashkenazi, but most of his readership is.

How to Talk About Zionism, A New Improved Guide By Joachim Martillo

Al-Jazeerah, March 8, 2005

While Israeli law is generally phrased with the use of the terms Jew or Jewish people,(*) Zionism is almost wholly a production of ethnic Ashkenazim.(**) Polish or Russian Jews of Tatar/Turkic, Persian or Georgian ethnicity were not involved in the development of Zionist ideology and generally have not gotten along particularly well with ethnic Ashkenazim even if in recent times racist ethnic Ashkenazim have managed to co-opt, recruit and enmesh Jews of other ethnicities into Zionist crimes.

The point is important because Zionist propaganda reinterprets the Ashkenazi ethnic group as the pan-Judaic ethnonational group in order to make a ridiculous primordialist claim to Palestine just as German Nazi propaganda equated modern Germans to ancient Teutonic and Gothic tribes in order to claim that only pure Germans had a right to reside in German territories. Neither primordialist claim has a shred of truth, but it is worthwhile to remember that the basic ideas of both German Nazi and also Zionist primordialism developed together in the common fields of Central and Eastern European blood and soil nationalism. The poisonous weeds of German Nazism and Zionism cross fertilized each other.

Modern Germans probably have more Celtic, Slavic and Turkic ancestry than they have ancient Teutonic or ancient Gothic ancestry.

Ethnic Ashkenazim have no ancestral connection to Palestine. The culture, language and religion of Roman period Palestinian Galileans, Judeans and Idumeans were completely unlike those of modern ethnic Ashkenazim.

Progressives should not give any legitimacy to Zionist (really ethnic Ashkenazi Nazi) terminology by using the racist language of Zionism. In 1948 racist ethnic Ashkenazim stole Palestine with concommittant plundering and ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population. Today, racist ethnic Ashkenazim and racist Zionist colonizers manipulate the US political system to the detriment of the USA for the sake of Israel. These racists squander American wealth and lives to the benefit of their racist tribalism.

Avoiding the terms Jew, Jewish, Judaism etc. provides many benefits.

Ignorant Christians often believe that because the foregoing terms have some sort of etymological relationship to Judea, Jews have some sort of overriding right to claim Palestine. The idea is moronic because the use of the term Roman in Roman Catholic certainly does not give Roman Catholic Irish the right to steal Rome from the residents of Rome.

Furthermore, when people argue that all decent people should criticize racist Jews for what they do (stealing Palestine or supporting the theft of Palestine), many worry that such criticism comes too close to criticizing Jews for being Jews, which is a bad thing. When people argue that all decent people should criticize racist Ashkenazim and racist Zionist colonizers for what they do (stealing Palestine or supporting the theft of Palestine), there is no difference between such criticism and the criticism of German racists during the 30s and 40s for ethnic cleansing, invading Poland, and mass murdering. Most people consider criticism of German racists and German Nazis at that time period to have been a good thing. Likewise today criticizing ethnic Ashkenazi racists and Zionist colonizers is also a good thing. Everyone should do it (especially antiracist ethnic Ashkenazim, who can neutralize bogus accusations of anti-Semitism by taking the vanguard position in demanding the abolition of the State of Israel and the eradication of Zionism/ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism).

(*) Likewise German Nazi law was usually phrased with the use of the terms Aryan or Aryan race. Modern Israeli Hebrew does not make a distinction between people or race, and the words used correspond best to German Volk.

(**) Likewise German Nazism was almost wholly a production of ethnic Germans and not every group that the German Nazis defined to be Aryans. Houston Stewart Chamberlain is one of those few non-Germans that made a fairly large contribution to German Nazi thinking. The Polish nationalist poet Mickiewicz made some similar and early contributions to Zionist thinking among ethnic Ashkenazim.

On Terrorism

By American history and precedent terrorism against state-supported violent racism is completely justified. Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Zionist racists is exactly as justified as hacking slavers to death with swords in Bleeding Kansas. Reverend Professor Ralph Waldo Emerson (HDS, HC 1821) and Henry David Thoreau (HC 1837) raised money in Harvard Yard to support John Brown in Bleeding Kansas. All patriotic antiracist Americans and decent human beings in general should support Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Zionists, who are the enemies of the whole human race.

The only downside to Palestinian terrorism is the death of the Palestinian attacker. There have been no innocent Zionist civilians since the Zionists began their war of ethnic cleansing in December 1947. Suicide attacks against Zionist civilians are no more problematic than suicide attacks against German Nazi civilians during the Hitler period. Even though most Zionist factions effectively collaborated with Nazis from 1933-39 under the Haavarah or Transfer Agreement, Jabotinskians undertook assassinations against German Nazi civilians, and Jabotinsky called for suicide attacks against Germans.

Zionists are waging a dirty demographic war against Palestinians and do not respect the status of protected noncombatants under the Geneva conventions. Racist Zionist invaders, thieves and interlopers have been brutalizing, raping and murdering the native population (including women and children) of Palestine at least since the 19-naughts. Moreover, Zionists have frequently stated since the beginning of the 20th century that every single Jew in Palestine is a weapon or foot soldier in the demographic war against Palestine. The defenders always have the right to destroy the weapons or kill the soldiers of the invaders. Under such conditions Palestinians have no recourse but proportionate response to purposeful and indiscriminate IDF murder of Palestinian civilians.

Americans have been conditioned to believe that Israeli Zionists as Jews could not possibly do the horrible things that anyone will see and experience if he or she lives among Palestinians for a few weeks. (Joshua Hammer, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and later a Nieman fellow, made such a statement at Harvard.) In fact, during the 30s many Americans refused to believe that the German Nazis were committing Nazi crimes because such criminality was inconceivable for Germans, a people that had produced Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach etc. The idea that German Nazis or Israeli Zionists could not perpetrate the crimes of Nazism and Zionism is simply racist prejudice based in an assumption of German or Israeli Jewish superiority to the people they are victimizing.

Israeli Zionists are the most militarized people on the planet. There is hardly a square centimeter of Israel that is not a legitimate military target, and buses are dual use civilian military vehicles that are used as troop carriers and that service illegal settlements. By US rules of engagement attacking such vehicles is certainly allowable, and during the Kosova war the USA attacked similar and to my mind far less military targets.

Every weapon that the Israeli Zionists criminals use against the native population is bought or provided by the USA. Without the USA Israeli Zionism would just be a bad memory. Palestinians are in fact at least as much at war with the USA, which as been manipulated into a satanic foreign policy by traitorous ethnic Ashkenazi American Neoconservative racists like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith and Wurmser and by irredentist neo-Confederate white racists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberts and Richard Land.

Israeli Zionists are the bad guys and represent an evil in the world today just as the German Nazis did in the 30s. Nowadays, we Americans are the bad guys because we are allied with Israeli Zionists. We Americans have to accept that Americans and Israeli Zionists may be subjected to attacks by billions of people justifiably enraged at our policies, just as Germans whether military or civilian were subject to attacks by the French, Polish, Russian and Yugoslav resistance during WW2. As the bad guys and allies of the bad guys we Americans have no more right to criticize the tactics of the resistance than the German Nazis had. In retrospect and to this day we consider the anti-Nazi resistance heroes that fought for all of humanity. Likewise the Palestinian resistance today is heroic and fights for all of humanity.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=17&article_id=16760

Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star

Thursday, July 14, 2005
Muslims can no longer remain silent about the hijacking of their faith

Editorial

Terrorists continue to take their utter disregard for human life to more and more horrifying levels. Yesterday, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden car into a U.S. Humvee in a Baghdad neighborhood, where U.S. troops were handing out candy to Iraqi children. The killers will perhaps claim a victory because their attack killed one U.S. soldier. But their act of violence also killed 27 Iraqi children and maimed 31 other young boys and girls.

It has been said over and over again that such gruesome attacks are a gross affront to humanity, and the vast majority of Muslim scholars have condemned the murder of innocent civilians. The grand imam of one of Sunni Islam's most respected centers of learning, Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, has said that Islamic law "rejects all attempts on human life and all attacks on civilians." Even "terrorist" resistance groups such as Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizbullah denounced the killing of innocents in the wake of the recent bombings in London.

But a tiny fringe of fanatics led by the likes of Al-Qaeda leaders Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden are sending another message, and in doing so, they are tarnishing the image of Islam. This self-styled ulema has issued fatwas in support of indiscriminate killing. Zarqawi has recently said that the killing of innocent Muslims, women and children in in Iraq "is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad."

It is because of murderers like Zarqawi and bin Laden that the image of Muslims and Islam has been so badly tarnished in recent years. Islam ought to be known as a religion based on social justice and respect for human life and dignity. But instead, the fanatics are hijacking the faith of Muslims and reinforcing the erroneous belief that Islam is a religion of violence and oppression. Because of these fanatics pose such a serious threat, not only to Westerners, but to Muslims and Islam itself, the Muslim community has every right to disown them from their faith. It has now become a duty for Muslims to unequivocally denounce these killers as non-believers.

The Muslim community can and should go further in condemning such acts of violence. Leaders at the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit will meet later this year in Mecca, where they plan to address the issue of terrorism in Iraq. One hopes that they will issue a strong condemnation of any attack that targets innocent civilians - whether it is in Iraq, London, New York, Madrid or Tel Aviv. No one in the Muslim community can continue to condone or remain silent about these barbarities.

Copyright (c) 2005 The Daily Star Sphere: Related Content

Zionazi Racial Science

[Note this blogentry has been updated for consistency with the Forward website.]

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Yale University addresses the flaws in Zionazi racial science in a letter to the Society of Histocompatibility and Immunology. (More material can be found at THE AMBASSADORS - OPINIONS - Vol. 5, Issue 1 (January 2002)
http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue11/opinions2.htm).

=================

Dear President Bray, President-elect Zeevi, and Society of Histocompatability and Immunology Officers:

I am asking that you print this in the journal as a response to the unfair treatment of Dr.Arnaiz-Villena et al. following publication of their paper and to read and act on my comments.

Arnaiz-Villena et al. published a paper in this journal titled "The origin of Palestinians and their genetic relatedness with other Mediterranean populations (Human Immunology. 62(9):889-900, 2001). It is one of at least 13 papers published in this journal by Dr.Arnaiz-Villena and colleagues (hundreds published elsewhere). The paper demonstrated with ample evidence the similarity of certain Jewish populations to Palestinians. After some pressures because the data appears inconsistent with Zionist ideology and mythology (including the preposterous claims that Palestinians are recent immigrants to the "land of Israel" and Jews as a distinct race), the paper was pulled from web pages and the society took an unprecedented and in my humble opinion illegal action of penalizing an author (removing him from the editorial board) to satisfy a political constituency within the society.

The data provided by the paper is ironically consistent with data published in the same journal by Israeli scientists (Amar et al. "Molecular analysis of HLA class II polymorphisms among different ethnic groups in Israel" Human Immunology, 1999, 60:723-730). Amar et al. showed that "Israeli Arabs" (Palestinians who are Israeli citizens) are closer to Sephardic Jews than either is to Ashkenazi Jews. The data also showed that Ethiopian Jews are genetically very distant from all. Yet, Amar et al. incredibly concluded that "We have shown that Jews share common features, a fact that points to a common ancestry." Amar et al also failed to include Slavic populations in the study which would have revealed similarities between Ashkenazi and these populations in the areas around the black Sea (see below).

Unfortunately, misuse of genetics is not new. Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883 (Greek; eu means "good" and genic derives from the word for "born"). Galton defined it as "the science of improvement of the human race germ plasm through better breeding." At the height of the eugenics movement in the 1920s, the Encyclopedia Britannica (1926) entry on eugenics emphasized that the term connoted a "plan" to influence human reproduction.

Between 1907 and 1960 in the United States at least 60,000 people were sterilized without their consent pursuant to state laws to prevent reproduction by those deemed genetically inferior (especially mentally retarded or those with psychological problems). At the peak of these programs in the 1930s, about 5,000 persons were sterilized annually. Based on the American development (especially the works of the American champion of Eugenics, Harry Hamilton Laughlin), the Eugenics of the Nazis grew to eclipse and the American system and then to become even much more and contribute to the mass murder of Jews, Gypsies and others. These examples (& Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union) are well studied by societies determined not to repeat these horrendous laws. Few now believe it is useful or desirable to limit diversity and enhance ideas of racial purity or protecting the gene pool of a particular population. So how is this relevant to Zionism and Jewish nationalism?

The founders of Zionism were Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazi) who argued that they are fulfilling the ingathering of the Jews to "their ancestral homelands." Many argued that assimilation and interbreeding with communities where Jews exist were very dangerous. Many worked feverishly to establish links (however tenuous) between Ashkenazi Jews are and the ancient Israelites (and named their new country Israel) as evidenced by the published works of Bonne-Tamir and others. Much was spent to explain away the physical differences between Ashkenazi Jews (light skins, fair smooth hair), and Sephardic (oriental) Jews and massage the data to fit the pre-ordained conclusions. Here is an example.

An article titled "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes" was published in PNAS, vol. 97, no. 12, June 6,2000 (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/12/6769). The article is from the laboratory of Dr. Bonne Tamir in Israel and is co-authored with 11 other authors. PNAS publishes articles based on communication from respected scientists and not by the traditional peer review process (although those communicating the article are encouraged to have them peer reviewed). This particular article was communicated by Arno G. Motulsky.

Of course Ashkenazi Jews would be closer to Arabs than either is to the Europeans studied in the PNAS paper. But Ashkenazim are also clearly closer to Turkic/Slavic than either is to Sephardim or Arab populations. The authors avoided studying Slavic groups that researchers have identified as closely related to hypothetical Slavic ancestral populations of modern Ashkenazi communities. The article seems to have avoided discussing this particularly problematical issue and insisted in the conclusion to reiterate the contention made in the introduction that Jews of today are by and large descendent from the original Israelites. As Daniel Friedman wrote (http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/friedman.html ):

"The relative abundances of specific haplotypes within the Ashkenazi population included in Hammer's study appear to have significant differences from the reconstructed "ancestral Jewish population" and "Separate analysis is also necessary to determine the genetic contribution of the various central Asian Turkic tribes which so strongly influenced European history."

Italian researches studied many more populations including more diverse Turkish and Eastern European populations (American Journal of Human Genetics, 61:1015-1935). The study looked at Y chromosome polymorphisms (genetic variations) in 58 populations including European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African. That study clearly shows that Ashkenazi Jewish samples clustered distinct from Sephardic Jews and closer to Turkic samples. Overall, the genetic data in that study were congruent with linguistic distances. The authors concluded that genetic data do not justify a single origin for the currently disparate Jewish subpopulations (Ashkenazi and Sephardi). It seems odd though that authors who are accepting of Zionist claims or are Jewish make conclusions not even supported by their own data while authors from other backgrounds based on similar data (showing clear links of Ashkenazim to Turkic populations) make differing conclusions.

The claims of a "single Jewish origin" flies in the face of incredibly rich data from historical and archeological sources including: language (e.g. Yiddish origin and history and absence of use of Aramaic in ancient Khazar Jewish sources), the conversion of Yemenite Arab populations to Judaism and Christianity. There is ample historical evidence that Levantine people and Eastern European Jewish people do share ancestry as well as evidence for significant population mixing. Greek and Turkish populations exported their people throughout the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Asia Minor and the Levant (e.g. the Ottoman Empire and the Hellenistic periods). Similarly Slavic populations have exported people into Asia Minor and the Levant. There was thus tremendous mixing of populations.

Some studies on Eastern European Jewish people have been used to support the idea that the Zionist colonization of Palestine represented a return of a race of Jewish people to their homeland. Valid scientific research must not be shunned by political pressure groups intent on preventing any rational discussion and stifling apparent conflict with the aims of Zionism. Similarly, scientists should not be allowed to publish statements and conclusions not supported by the data simply because they appear "politically correct" at the moment or do not generate an outcry. A statement such as that by Amir et al. that "We have shown that Jews share common features, a fact that points to a common ancestry" should not be allowed to stand. The correct statement from their own data is that some Jews (Sephardim) are more similar to Palestinians than either group is to other Jews (Ashkenazim or Ethiopian Jews).

Of course the transition from any kind of genetic evidence to justify dispossession of the native Palestinians by Ashkenazi immigrants from Europe is in no way justified regardless of population genetics. After all, one would have to be totally immune to basic elements of justice to allow dispossession of people who are native in every sense of the word and whose ancestors farmed the land for hundreds of years (if not thousands) based on any kind of perceived separatedness/uniqueness of gene pools of the new immigrants/settlers. To use "genetic" tools (regardless of their distortion or validity), to justify denying Palestinian people the right of self-determination is of course a travesty of justice. Genetics and eugenics has been used successfully in many other instances to justify the unjustifiable. Distortions of the science of genetics was used for racist and ethnic cleansing many times before. Unfortunately this particular use may not be the last one either.

Sincerely,

Mazin Qumsiyeh,
Ph.D.Associate ProfessorDepartment of Genetics
Yale University School of Medicine
Email: mazin.qumsiyeh@yale.edu

=================

Dr. Qumsiyeh correctly surmises the connection of modern Zionist racial pseudoscience to 19th and early 20th century racial pseudoscience. For the smoking gun I refer the interested reader to a series of articles written by Vladimir Jabotinsky in Evreiskaia zhizn' (Hebrew Life) between 1904 and 1914. I know that advocates of Zionist racial science like to cite a few articles by Indian scientists, but these researchers are typically associated with the Hindutva movement, which has long-standing ties to Jabotinskians.

Dr. Qumsiyeh also addresses some of the flaws in the PNAS paper but not all. Hammer and Oppenheim in their studies have consistently and quite improperly used self-identification in their research to class an individual as Ashkenazi or Sephardi. Until recent times the population that is considered Ashkenazi probably consisted of at least 3 genetically distinct subpopulations. The modern concept of Sephardim is a rather artificial construct that consists of an Ibero-Berber refugee population and numerous unconnected local communities throughout N. Africa and the Orient. As these communities were generally very small and highly endogamous, we should have expected significant genetic drift among them.

The analysis that Hammer and Oppenheim have carried out implicitly depends on a Palestinian emigrant founder model. Because we have no genetic information on the alleged ancient Israelite population, the Hammer and Oppenheim research begs the question that it is supposed to address. Dr. Qumsiyeh does not explicitly make the claim, but the body of research better fits the hypothesis of a major founder population in Southern Russia that has been exporting population to Judean/Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean since the 8th century. Refinements to this hypothesis would include additional founder communities in the Balkans, Mesopotamia and Eastern Europe.

Hammer is also the primary author of Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests (http://www.familytreedna.com/nature97385.html). It is hard to square Hammer's results current archeological theories about the Exodus (there was none) and the origins of the "ancient Israelite" population. Moreover, the alleged founding modal haplotype of Jewish priesthood is particularly common among Sicilians and Armenians. Lately, Zionist racial scientists have stopped citing the claims of the Cohen haplotype because it only inspires derision among genuine scientists.

Some new theories of the behavior of the Y Chromosome have challenged the fundamental assumptions of the use of haplotypes in genetic anthropology.

More recent studies have shown that certain genetic markers common among Ashkenazim and other European ethnic groups that are hypothesized to be descendants of Central Asian migrant populations are indeed common among certain Central Asian population groups but are not particularly common in the Syro-Palestinian region.

Here is another article that has been completely expunged from the Forward website, that describes the Zionist prejudices associated with research in Jewish genetic anthropology, and that belies the idea of single Jewish origin..

http://www.forward.com/articles/1864

Genetics

A Skeleton in the Jewish Family Closet?

By TALIA BLOCH
August 20, 2004

Has there been a non-Jewish "skeleton" sitting quietly in the Jewish family closet?

That's the implication of a recent genetic study.

The study, "Multiple Origins for Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries," published last fall in The American Journal of Human Genetics, suggests that about half of all Ashkenazi Jewish men of the Levite caste may be descendant from one or a handful of closely related Eastern European ancestors who lived about 1,000 years ago.

The problem, for Jews at least, is that those ancestors probably were not Jewish, but Slavic. According to Jewish law, membership in one of the three groups of Cohen, Levi or Israel is passed down from father to son alone. Both the priestly caste of Cohanim (plural of Cohen) and their helpers, the Levites, are said to be descendant from the biblical tribe of Levi. Scientists and historians, therefore, speculate that the evidence uncovered by the genetic study shows that some ancestors who contributed genes in the formative years of the Ashkenazi community either were faking their status as Levites or simply mistakenly believed they were Levites when they were not.

"One would have to assume that at some point close to the founding of the Ashkenazi community, somebody or some people — it doesn't have to be a lot of people — assimilated into Levitical standing," said Lawrence Schiffman, chairman of the department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

This misidentified Levite would have had to either have been a convert himself, or to have inherited his genes from a convert or even from a non-Jewish father, since the genetic markers that are found among Ashkenazi Levites frequently occur among non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, but are extremely rare within the general Ashkenazi population.

"It could have been a conversion or something less pleasant, like a rape or other nonpaternity event," explained Dr. Karl Skorecki, director of the Technion's Rappaport Family Institute for Research in the Medical Sciences in Haifa, Israel, and one of the principal researchers on the study. A nonpaternity event is one in which the father of a child is not known or not acknowledged publicly.
When scientists study the paternal line of inheritance, they look at the y-chromosome, which determines maleness and is passed down from father to son, largely unchanged.

Since the time of the first human male, however, occasional misspellings of the y-chromosome's sequence of DNA letters have occurred, coalescing into what researchers have identified as 18 different primary groupings. Known as haplogroups, these groupings break down along geographic and ethnic lines.

Previous studies have shown that the type of y-chromosome most frequently found among Jewish men falls into the same groups as that of Middle Eastern populations, confirming a Middle Eastern ancestry for Jews.

A landmark study in 1997 determined that a majority of Cohanim not only clustered into the same group, but also shared a more specific identical genetic marker. "Seventy percent of all Cohanim have the same y-chromosomal lineage tracing back to the same common ancestor," said Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, who was also a researcher on the Levite study. "You would expect the same for the Levites."

Instead, researchers found that while Sephardi Levites had the same genetic lineage as Cohanim, slightly more than half the Ashkenazi Levites had y-chromosomes that very much resembled those of the Slavic individuals included in the study.

"What's also striking," noted Skorecki, "is how closely related the Ashkenazi Levites are. They are so similar to each other, like brothers, over a vast geographic expanse." It is this similarity that led researchers to the conclusion that the progenitor for this group could only have been one man or several men within the same family.

Researchers also estimate that the originating ancestor entered the Jewish gene pool close to the founding of the Ashkenazi community. "It probably happened about 1,000 years ago, early in the genesis of Ashkenazi Jewry," said Neil Bradman of the University College London and a third researcher on the study, which included 12 scientists from Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

It is commonly accepted among geneticists that the Ashkenazi Jewish community started from a very small base — perhaps 30,000 people alive in the year 1500 — but between the 15th and the 19th century swelled from about 50,000 to 5 million individuals.

"The fact that there is not much genetic diversity argues for relatively few founders" of the community, said Dr. Harry Ostrer, director of the human genetics program of the pediatrics department at New York University School of Medicine, who specializes in population genetics.

Yet, in the extant historical records there is never any mention of non-Levites assuming Levitical status. "If your father is not a Cohen or a Levi, there is no way you can become one," said Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary. A convert, by definition, could not. But this does not mean that someone couldn't pass himself off as a Levite.

Diamond speculated that confusion might have occurred as the result of a talmudic passage concerning the ritual of pidyon haben or redemption of the first born, in which, at the age of 30 days, a first-born son is symbolically released from Temple service. If a child's father is a Cohen or Levite, no pidyon haben is necessary. The Talmud cites a case in which a woman had relations with a gentile man. "Somewhat surprisingly, the Talmud says that this child is exempt from pidyon haben," Diamond explained. Since the father was not a Jew, paternal identity reverted back to the mother's father, who in this case was a Levite. Since for this one ritual alone, the child is treated as if he were a Levite, Diamond speculated it is conceivable that this may have caused the confusion.

It is also possible that a woman who was married to a Levite but had a son out wedlock, either because of a rape or an affair, still might have raised her son as if he were a Levite.

There is one other possible explanation, researchers say. "I slightly favor the hypothesis that it was one Jew from the Middle East who, because of the bottleneck effect, passed [the chromosome] along," Hammer said. Although highly infrequent, the y-chromosome shared by non-Jewish Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Levites does occur occasionally among other Jews. It is therefore possible that one man among the founders of the Ashkenazi community happened to carry it. Because he was just one among very few founders, this man's genes were replicated many times and became overrepresented in subsequent generations — the bottleneck effect.

While Skorecki acknowledged that this explanation also was plausible, he remarked that "it would be a remarkable coincidence to have this set of markers which are the same as the people around them" appear in the Jewish population, but originate with someone who traces his ancestry back to the Middle East.

Another researcher into Jewish genetics who did not participate in this study, Neil Risch of Stanford University, commented that he saw no flaws in the study, but added: "One can never prove where something came from" completely.

Researchers and scholars emphasized that the aim of the Levite study was to illuminate an aspect of Jewish history, and not in any way to determine identity today. "A person's religious or ethnic identity should be separated from anything genetic or physical," Skorecki said when listing the most important conclusions he drew from the study. He saw a "social-ethical imperative not to extrapolate to individual identity."

Ostrer concurred: "If someone has a non-Jewish haplotype, it doesn't mean that person is not Jewish,"

Added Schiffman: "People have to understand one thing. [The study] reflects history and not some form of modernity. We are not going to go around testing to see who is a Levite and then suggest that people should be de-Levitized."

Copyright 2005 © The Forward

Sphere: Related Content

A Litmus Test for Jewish Anti-Zionists

While there were people religiously Jewish in Poland, there was not a single ethnic group associated with the Jewish religion in Poland. People that might as a matter of religion belong to the Jewish religious community could be ethnically Ashkenazi from originally Yiddish speaking groups (there was the beginning of a linguistic shift to Russian in the 19th century) or ethnically Tatar from originally Turkic speaking groups.

Yiddishists worked hard to create the concept of a Jewish (i.e. Yiddish) ethnicity and rejected any connection to religiously Jewish groups that did not speak Yiddish. It is fairly easy to find comments in the late 19th century and early 20th century from Yiddishists like Israel Abrahams to the effect "Zee zenen nit yidn vi mir -- they (non-Ashkenazi Jews) are not Jews (Yidn) like us."

Zionists parasitized the efforts of Yiddishists to create a Yiddish ethnicity by reinterpreting the Ashkenazi (Yiddish) ethnic group as the pan-Judaic ethnonational group that was descended from Palestinian Judeans and Galileans of the Greco-Roman period and that still had legitimate claim to Palestine. Before the theft of Palestine from the native Palestinian population, Zionist Ashkenazim had no interest in non-Ashkenazi Jews except occasionally for propaganda purposes. Norman Stillman documents the behavior and attitudes of Zionist Ashkenazim toward non-Ashkenazi Jews in The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times.

After the theft, the Zionist leadership realized that they had not enough manpower to hold stolen Palestine and would need an ersatz native collaborator class to make up for the lack of ethnic Ashkenazi settler colonists. Zionists created conditions for the transfer of Jewish Arabs and Persians to Palestine and then subjected them to humiliation and disdain that a genuine indigenous native collaborator class would have experienced. I have spent several hours listening to IBA tapes from the 50s and 60s. The bigotry and racism that dominant ethnic Ashkenazim in stolen Palestine were willing to express at that time period is quite astounding unless one keeps in mind that ethnic Ashkenazim were no less prejudiced than other Central and Eastern European ethnic groups of that time period.

When ethnic Ashkenazim use the term "Jew" they mean ethnic Ashkenazi. In the USA where practically all the people that might use the term Jew to describe themselve in the religious, Yiddishist or Zionist sense are ethnic Ashkenazim, the issue is not too important except that racist Ashkenazim use the etymological connection of Jew to Judea to justify the theft of Palestine from the native population. Treating such a claim to be legitimate is logically equivalent to believing that Irish would have the right to seize Rome from the native population because many Irish are practicing Roman Catholics, and all Irish are therefore really Romans with absolute title to Rome.

The issue is not academic because many ethnic Ashkenazim in the USA claim to be anti-Zionist, join anti-Zionist groups, and then precede to render those groups completely non-functional.

Therefore, I suggest a simple litmus test for any self-identifying Jew of Ashkenazi ethnicity that wants to join anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian groups.

He must state the following.

1) There is no Jewish people, which is a concept of Zionist myth and ideology. I am of ethnic Ashkenazi background.

2) No Jews in any modern sense resided in Palestine in Greco-Roman times. The Palestinian population of that time period consisted of Judeans, Galileans, Idumeans, Samarians, Nabateans, Greeks and other groups with no demonstrable ancestral connection to modern ethnic Ashkenazim or other modern Jewish groups except perhaps some communities of Syro-Palestinian Arabophone Jews.

3) The Zionist colonizers of Palestine constitute a criminal population of thieves and interlopers. Either they make full restitution to the native Palestinian population (including restoration of residence and property rights) and fully acknowledge their crimes and the crimes of Zionism, or they must be removed from Palestine.

4) The only population in the modern world with any significant probability of descent from ancient Palestinian Israelite, Ephraimite, Judahite, Judean, Samarian, Galilean or Idumean populations are the modern Palestinians.

If a self-identifying Jew refuses to assent to any of the above statements, he is accepting Zionist ideology in all or in part and cannot legitimately be part of any genuinely anti-Zionist group, and if accepted as a member, he would probably disrupt it.

Joachim Martillo Sphere: Related Content